“Do you know why you’re here?” Mitch asked.
Eve said nothing.
I’m going to trigger her … she may snap … or clam up.
“Do you know where you are, Eve?”
“Your questions are annoying me … Doctor,” she said with contempt.
“You think you’re ready to tell me your secret?”
A twisted grin graced her lips.
“Fair enough,” Eve said. “A deal is a deal.” She clapped her hands together and made a sound.
“So, let me tell you about the first time I took a life.”
CHAPTER 18
LOOKING BACK, I SHOULD have been more alarmed about what was going on with you. I suppose that goes for us all. I mean, we all met Ruby—charming Ruby, lovely British Ruby—but nobody thought anything of it. We thought she was a character of yours, someone from the world of Harry Potter. We figured Ruby was you, just pretending, playing a silly, harmless game that would come and go.
But what nobody knew was that by then, I’d already met Eve.
You’d been living with us for a year and a half, so that would have made you six, and I’d have been eight. Ryan and I were still sharing the same bedroom, which Mom had painted a manly shade of gray, something we covered with posters of sports stars and superheroes.
I liked having you around from the minute you came to live with us. There wasn’t a big adjustment period, not that I recall anyway. One minute you weren’t living in our house, and the next it was as if you’d always been there. I mean, there were small things. At first you were all “thank you,” and “please,” and “may I,” but little by little, as you got comfortable with us, and we with you, away went a “thank you,” then a “please,” then a “may I,” until after some time you were just like me and Ryan: asking, taking, demanding, while Mom and Dad did what they could to keep us in line.
We’d gone from being two kids to three, and that was fine with us—better than fine. It was great. Honestly, the early years of you becoming a Francone would have made for a terribly boring movie. Nothing happened, it was all perfectly normal. There were school days, and you had homework to do, activities like softball, piano, and karate, TV, messing around, bike riding, basketball on the driveway with that hoop we held up with sandbags, and weekends spent doing whatever. The days all kind of blended into a great whirling blur of family life. Yes, you were shy in a crowd, shy at school, always were, but with us you could be your boisterous, laughing, fun-loving self, and we loved you for it.
Most mornings we ate breakfast together, more often than dinner, because of the restaurant. You loved Apple Jacks the best, which Mom never bought before you came. Once she found out you favored them, well, suddenly the pantry was never without a box.
In no time at all you became our little princess, though you weren’t very princess-like when you showed up to the restaurant to “help out.” All you wanted to do at Big Frank’s was play with balls of dough, and Dad was more than happy to oblige you. Your giggles while you made pizza creatures, the delight in your eyes when Dad baked them into something you could eat—those are really sweet memories of a really sweet little sister.
At first I didn’t know what it meant to have a little sister, but I became your protective big brother in no time. It was important to me that you were safe. After the hide-and-seek debacle, I was always checking up on you. That gave us a good taste of what it would be like if we ever lost you for real. For Mom, it was a great relief, because I was a second set of eyes, which came in especially handy during the weekend getaways down on the Cape, at that hotel with the indoor water park.
You’d never seen a water park before, and this one was tiny in comparison to most, but to you it was the greatest place ever. The chlorine was so strong it turned our eyes red just standing on the tiled edge of the pool. You didn’t know how to swim, you’d never had a lesson in your life, but you didn’t have one bit of fear either, not one. You jumped right in with your floaties latched around your arms, and it was my job （and Mom’s, who hovered over you back then before those JCC lessons finally paid off） to make sure you stayed above the water line. Your lack of skill and experience didn’t stop you from going down the slide—I remember that clearly.
I also remember waking up in the middle of the night to see you standing next to my bed holding Wally the Walrus in one hand, a big pair of scissors in the other.
Earlier that evening, Ryan had changed the TV channel from a show you were watching to one he wanted to watch. You got quite upset at him, didn’t you? But he was bigger, older by four years, and you didn’t get your way even when you pleaded with Mom. She thought you’d had enough TV for the day and asked you to do something else.